It is the intent of the Concordia University Portland ITS Infrastructure Office to use hosted or cloud solutions for new technology solutions when practical as part of a long-term business continuity initiative.

All new technology services will at a minimum be evaluated for their ability to be virtualized for mobility between the Portland, Boise and cloud data centers. Physical servers and appliances will be avoided whenever possible. When possible, if a hosted or managed option for the solution is available, this will be preferred.

The objective of this initiative is to drive mission critical services to reliable cloud platforms, or to have hosted or managed these solutions to reduce the dependency on the limited staffing and resources available in the Portland and Boise offices and data centers. It is possible that in some cases the cost to host services in the cloud or with the vendor providing the product may exceed the direct costs of hosting or managing the application ourselves. However, until the administrative, hardware and facilities costs for maintaining highly available and resilient solutions in house is properly quantified and accounted for, a preference will be given to hosted and managed solutions even when there is a higher cost. In an effort to provide better, more reliable services long term and be more fiscally efficient with our resources, it is important that we utilize these OpEx budgeted options to avoid significant CapEx expenditures.

It is incumbent on the party requesting the services to coordinate with ITS-I to make sure the appropriate costs for the solution are integrated into the proposal for any new or changing technology solution budgets.

The CIO of Concordia University Portland will have final ruling on the method by which new solutions are implemented under the guidance of the ITS Infrastructure department.